Backend Software Engineer

Role Overview

Backend Software Engineer at dentsu, building and deploying AI systems capabilities that drive business value and enhance global media products. You’ll partner with product managers, data scientists, and engineers to deliver AI systems for content personalization, audience analytics, and creative optimization.

Responsibilities

• API System Design: Architect, develop, and test production-grade Python APIs for media products.
• Orchestration: Support data pipelines, background jobs, and distributed systems that interact with AI models.
• Collaboration & Planning: Work with technical stakeholders to design scalable systems and create implementation plans aligned to product goals.
• Deployment & Scaling: Build robust long-running process systems using databases, caching, retry logic, and fallback behavior.
• Monitoring & Error Handling: Ensure errors are routed for proper triaging.
• Testing: Design and maintain automated tests and manual stress/quality testing frameworks for AI systems.
• Ethics & Compliance: Apply data governance and cybersecurity practices, ensuring fairness, transparency, and regulatory compliance.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or related field.
• 2–4 years designing, maintaining, and testing enterprise-grade REST APIs.
• Expert Python skills and strong experience with concurrent systems (asyncio, tornado, celery, etc.).
• Production experience with complex long-running processes handling data collection.
• Workflow orchestration experience (Prefect, Airflow, Dagster).
• Data persistence experience with Redis, PostgreSQL, and/or other databases including MongoDB.
• Production experience with monitoring enterprise systems.
• Ability to architect maintainable, extensible systems; avoid over-engineering.
• Familiarity with LLMs and mitigating performance challenges using providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Cohere.
• Proficiency with version control.
• Knowledge of containerization, DevOps tools, and CI/CD pipelines.

Work Location / Remote Policy

• Based in Maryland, United States.
• In-person collaboration with office attendance three days per week for employees within commuting distance of hub offices (Chicago, metro Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City); two days per week for Los Angeles-based employees. Employees outside commuting range may be designated remote depending on role and business needs.

Salary & Benefits

• Annual salary range: $119,000–$145,000.
• Benefits include medical/vision/dental, life insurance, disability insurance, 401k, flexible paid time off, paid holidays, paid sick and safe leave, and paid parental leave.